My forfeit for Geek Girl Con having raised $2500. Yes, this means I’m participating in the DIY Science Zone track at GGC, specifically, doing a set of demonstrations about statistics, randomness and 20-sided dice.

A silent film about two giant underwater monsters. Done for Geek Girl Con 2014 fundraising, with great regrets. When the fundraiser hits $5000 raised, I vow to play Battletoads beginning to end, with unlimited lives, on Twitch.tv! Donate now to inflict pain upon me in retribution for my making you watch this nonsense!

The answer during any Mock The Movie instance to the question “what have I missed so far” is invariably “not much”. However, in this one, there WAS a John Barrowman ad-lib that made it to the final cut that you need to hear to believe. Said ad-lib was apparently an attempt by Barrowman to make the lead actress laugh; it failed, and the director kept it.

Growing up, I loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles — the comics, the cartoons, the video games, the movies, everything. Who am I kidding — I still do. I always wondered how the Renaissance artists after whom the Turtles were named would react to the idea of having ninjas — who were also mutated turtles, mind! — named after them, having their names’ value polluted for at minimum an entire generation.

Well, apparently so too did the folks in charge of Epic Rap Battles of History.

Fair warning — these rap battles often use problematic language, including this one which has a brief (but rather tame) instance: “you guys draw more dicks than New York Pride”.

This was a miserable pile of shit with a ton of rapey bits aimed both at the women and the Last Fertile Dude who has to go around screwing drugged women and having them thank him for it. And all of that was riding on Rowdy Roddy Piper’s charisma to pull it through. And he delivered absolutely none of the little charm he manages in the wrasslin’ ring.

This one was a real slog. My brain through the whole thing:

The ultimate verdict? Go to hell, writer of this movie Donald G. Jackson, who has evidently written nothing but cheesecake pap and a “documentary” about El Chupacabra.

This cannot hold a candle to the movie we did on Saturday at CONvergence, a special live Mock The Movie event attended by PZ, Stephanie, Ray (@DrRubidium), Ashley Q. Miller, and Miri Mogilevsky, when we took two hours off of running our parts of the con to sit around the big screen, have a drink, and mock Frankenfish. We might have to do a do-over of it on Twitter, because that was actually a decent movie… well, decent for mockability purposes, anyway.

Gotta admit, John Oliver knows how to work a crowd, and he doesn’t even have to sell magic beans to do it.

I like John Oliver a good deal, loved his Daily Show run, and empathize with his immigrant status in particular. I hope he’s a step up in sensitivity on some topics compared to Stewart, a fact not yet in evidence, though.

Okay, seriously. I know that WWDC is a sales pitch moreso than a tech demo. But this supercut of superlatives tweaks every nerve I have as regards manipulative language.

There’s not a lot of actual innovation in their new iteration, that I can see, just a nice coat of paint slapped on the same old stuff. “This changes everything” was true when iOS first got introduced, but now it’s all “this keeps everything the same except for a prettier wastebasket.”